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Wild Reel by Paul Brandon check out website: www.tor.com
Finvarra, the faerie lord, has his eye on his next queen. Unfortunately, Finvarra cannot take a faery queen and has to find his quarry in the mortal world. Add to this the fact that his previous wife inserted a clause into their marriage contract that forbade physical contact for ninety days and you have a desperate lord looking for love.
Natty gets a phone call. All at once her world perspective takes a shift
for the Down Under and she is suddenly in Australia for the wedding of an old
school friend. Finvarra and his court must follow his mortal woman to the opposite
side of the world to win her hand, but the whole tale is about to take turns for
the worse and that's just because the climate has gotten hotter! Paul
Brandon has used the Urban Fantasy genre to his advantage in his second novel
'The Wild Reel', taking Irish Faerie lords to the marsupial capital of the world,
Australia. Ordinarily, this plot development should be a serviceable one yet it lacks
believability. Natty and Sean's relationship has been very short lived, a couple
of months, during which time they haven't had sex because he has been sleeping
with other women. For me, as a woman of the age that Natty is portrayed, I couldn't
quite see it. Two months with a man and he destroys your life? Unlikely for a
twenty-seven- year-old. The whole ambience of this first portion of the book,
merely didn't sit right with me. However, as the story shifts to the
Faerie realm and later moves to the Australian continent, Brandon seems to get
his stride and move the characters on within the story. Natty is a likeable if
at times more a teenage heroine. Her lifestyle is at best a fantasy but, within
the pages of this book, it doesn't really matter. Where this book seems to find its pace is with the
interactions between the real and the faerie world. Brandon obviously relishes
the fact that his fantasy characters jump out at you from the page and they hold
nothing back! Farting, eating one another and generally being quite obscene they
draw emotional pieces that you just can't help but fall in love with. I
found, again at the start of the book, the language to be uncomfortably 'flowery'.
Lyrically undertaken to the point of being a hard slog to read although after
the first part of the book, the language seemed to settle down into a comfortable
measure of description to dialogue. The eventual ending was a little
predictable, finding the friends in couples, save for one. The obvious 'Finvarra
favourite' being made known far too early for my liking. But for a summer read,
it is an entertaining story with likeable characters. Overall, I found
myself wondering if 'The Wild Reel' wasn't suited to a more young adult audience,
although the swearing and at times rough sex would probably rule this out. It
seems to be one of those books that find its feet after several chapters and if
anything is a little naive in its depiction of the issues that were raised. A
good urban fantasy that held my attention but, sadly, wouldn't be my first choice
from the genre. Donna Jones
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OTHER REVIEWS - September 2004
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Natasha
Newlyn, known as Natty to her friends, is blessed and simultaneously cursed. She
has a talented eye for art, painting magical and inspiring landscapes of her home
on the coastline of Ireland. But while her art keeps food on the table, her curse
- nightmares that haunt enough to stop her from sleeping - keeps her like a tightly
wound spring. Terrified and unable to resolve why she is having these erotic but
nightly horrors, she remains unaware of the source.
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